KANAPLEV+LEYDIK

A Portrait Made against the Background

Photography exhibition

Julia Leydik

Ideal is a perfect embodiment of something, the best example of the kind. The ideal exists only in people’s minds, in one’s ideas and views on something. The project has turned out to be honest. No resistance on either side. In every woman’s subconscious there is her own “type”, her ideal – a type of celebrity she believes to have something in common with. For me the most important thing was to find the point of sincerity coming from the model. I had a few magazine portraits of beautiful and famous women. After flipping through these images together, I was asking the participants the same questions:

– Which one them do you feel you resemble? Whose appearance do you “put on” when attending an important meeting or when falling in love? Who do you often look up to, mentally repeating her gestures, her gaze?…

This was how I came to understand the saying: still waters run deep.

Women do keep an eye on the lives of “their types”: secretly looking at glossy magazines that have images of their secret idols – those that nobody knows of. One of the participants of the project. “My ideal, prototype, the image I want to identify myself, feeling this is really me, but not here and now – elsewhere, in dreams, that would probably never come true. In general, in another life – beautiful and vibrant, fountaining with energy, somewhere far away, but not here and not with me. There was only one single moment, and now we are together forever. Just like harmony, reality, beauty and eternity.”